Name
SESSION CANCELED Denver’s Green Continuum: Streetside GI for Urban Heat Mitigation
Date & Time
Thursday, August 31, 2023, 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM
Sarah Anderson
Description

Many municipalities embrace green infrastructure for water quality control on right-of-way projects and cite co-benefits as additional justification for taking the green approach. Denver Green Infrastructure takes this one step further by viewing urban heat island mitigation as a co-equal objective of green infrastructure capital projects. The Denver Green Continuum Streets Guidelines (“the Continuum”) is a guide for designing novel right-of-way green infrastructure that targets both stormwater and urban heat, while giving urban designers more flexibility. The Continuum categorizes green infrastructure into five Levels of Green. At higher Levels of Green there is greater stormwater volume control than at lower Levels of Green, but the cost, amount of engineering and construction impacts are higher. Lower Levels of Green provide a healthier canopy and greater cooling, and less (but not zero) stormwater runoff mitigation. This presentation will introduce the practical and climate drivers that led to the development of the Continuum, the components and control measures that make up each of Level of Green and a summary of the analysis that defined the criteria, performance and regulatory implications for each Level of Green. The presentation ends by touching on planning applications and hypothetical case studies to demonstrate the use of the new tools.

Location Name
Room D1
Full Address
Sheraton Dallas
400 Olive Street
Dallas, TX 75201
United States